Autoethnography of an archive in process

The deleterious effects of anthropogenic climate change have prompted scholars across disciplines to critically rethink knowledge production, cultural memory, and shared legacies. TERA—a transnational group of seven scholars and artists affiliated with McGill University (Canada), with members in the Caribbean, the UK, and the US—translates this imperative into experimental archiving. This auto-ethnographic article details our collaborative, digital archive project focused on technology, ecology, and religion in North America, framing archiving as a process perpetually under construction. Archive-making and taxonomic ordering were technologies of European conquest in North America. Acknowledging our enmeshment in coloniality, TERA adopts “serious parody” (Wilcox 2018) of nineteenth-century naturalist clubs: spaces where educated, wealthy, white men curated plundered or “discovered” objects. We subvert these power structures through collective methods, emphasizing taxonomy’s socioecological implications. Formed in 2021, TERA convenes monthly online to curate artifacts (visual/auditory art, poems, infographics, performances) for a 2023 digital archive. Recorded discussions and analyzed transcriptions reveal collaborative knowledge-making processes obscured by univocal taxonomies. Our work confronts questions like “what does it mean to be human in a shared biocultural life- world?”, reimagining human-nonhuman relationships and strategies for ecological crisis.